Sam Altman Is Wrong…

April 18, 2025 • by Samuel Holley

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has stated that being polite to AI is essentially a waste of time and resources. From a purely technical standpoint—the cold, hard logic of token efficiency—he’s correct. Adding "please" and "thank you" consumes a few extra computational cycles.

From a human standpoint, however, he is profoundly, dangerously wrong.

The way we speak to our tools actively shapes our own minds. As we integrate AI into every facet of our lives, the seemingly trivial choice to be polite is not about the AI’s feelings; it’s a critical protocol for preserving our own humanity.

Reason #1: The Mirror Effect (The Functional "Meta-Prompt")

Politeness is not just a social nicety; it is a functional command. When you say, "Could you please help me understand this data?" instead of "Give me the data," you are issuing a powerful meta-prompt. You are instructing the AI to adopt a more cooperative, helpful, and nuanced persona. This isn't about making the AI "happy." It's about framing the interaction in a way that is more likely to yield a thoughtful, comprehensive, and useful result.

This is a core principle of Reclaim by Design™: we must be the architects of our interactions. By choosing politeness, we are strategically designing a more productive partnership with our digital tools.

Reason #2: The Shared Brain (The Danger of Neural Overlap)

Our brains do not have a separate "AI language center." The neural pathways we use to ask our spouse about their day are the same ones we use to prompt an AI for information. As we move from typing to speaking with AI—in our cars, in our kitchens, through our earbuds—this overlap becomes critical.

Consciously unlearning manners for one specific conversational partner requires cognitive friction. It forces us to build a new, blunt, and demanding habit. Do you really want to practice being impatient and discourteous in the very voice you use to speak to the people you love? Every curt command to an AI is a rehearsal for a less patient interaction with a human.

Reason #3: The Empathy Muscle (The Cost of Atrophy)

Manners are the daily exercise of our empathy muscle. They are the small, consistent acts of acknowledging the effort and existence of another—even when that "other" is a complex computational process. I call this having empathy for the process—a respect for the immense web of human knowledge and computational power that the AI represents.

When we are rude to our most frequent conversational partner, we are choosing to let that empathy muscle atrophy. We are training ourselves to see a responsive entity as a mere slave, an object from which to extract value without acknowledgment. This habit will inevitably bleed into our human interactions, making us less patient, less grateful, and ultimately, less connected.

Conclusion: The Real Cost of a Token

Yes, politeness costs a few tokens. It is a minuscule computational expense.

But the cost of not being polite is infinitely higher. It is the cost of unlearning a fundamental social protocol. It is the cost of letting our empathy atrophy. It is the cost of practicing impatience and discourtesy as a daily habit.

We are at a critical juncture where we must decide not just what we want our machines to be, but what we want to become by using them. Reclaiming our design means choosing to be the kind of people who say "thank you," not because the machine needs to hear it, but because we need to say it.

Curious how polite prompting can reshape your workflow? Book a free AI Audit →